


Old as Your Omens

by stars_inthe_sky



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator Genisys (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Growing Up, Imaginary Friends, Movie: Terminator Genisys, On the Run, Skynet - Freeform, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-08 16:31:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8852104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stars_inthe_sky/pseuds/stars_inthe_sky
Summary: Sometimes, Sarah thinks Skynet is raising them all.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/gifts).



> [Several canonical timelines](http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/Sarah_Connor) within the Terminator universe—including those portrayed in T3, T:S, and TSCC—have Sarah's death occurring well before John's rise, usually in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
> 
> A [deleted scene from T:2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeL0xdVTy_g) reveals that "Uncle Bob" was able to learn and change because his CPU was switched from "read-only" mode—despite Sarah's intentions.

Pops wakes her up in the middle of the night and hands her a trash bag heavy with the pieces of an assault rifle. He does this from time to time, and Sarah’s almost gotten used to it—snapping awake as soon as her eyes open, not questioning what actions need taking. In the near-total darkness of tonight’s crappy motel room, she starts to assemble the gun by touch and sound, clicking each part into place.

There have been too many nights in the last several years when these motions were urgent and necessary—when she needed to wake up, to move swiftly and silently, to run or fight or both. There will be more of those nights. The T-1000 is unstoppable, after all, even more than Pops is.

(She still has to remind herself periodically that Pops has his own fragilities: She remembers being ten years old and demanding to know why he can’t adjust his own settings, remembers being handed a drill and pliers and trying not to gag as she cut and pried him open, remembers holding her only guardian’s life in her hands for a long minute and knowing that, for once, she had power over a machine.)

But tonight isn’t one of those nights; tonight is training, tonight is a reminder, a backwards sort of comfort in a life with very little of it.

Tonight, her mission is so simple and familiar that she can do it by rote, and her too-alert mind wanders, just a little. Sarah shifts her focus back to the bits of plastic and metal in front of her. She needs to know how each thing feels and fits, to teach it all to John later. Her fingers move faster than her thoughts; they have to. Thinking is all too often an indulgence she can’t afford.

But this isn’t one of those nights, and the thought hits her shortly after Pops, satisfied with her handiwork, sends her back to bed. _To teach it all to John_. Someday, she’ll pass this cold, lonely life on to her son. She’ll be the one administering midnight tests, pushing the tools of war into a child’s grasp, marching that child through to the adulthood humanity needs him to reach all too soon.

In the years since Pops rescued her, Sarah has barely thought about the person she’s supposed to bear and raise. He’s central to her continued existence—the reason Pops saved her life, the reason Skynet wants her dead—but until now she’d never considered him as an actual person, as someone on the verge of living through so much of what she already has, someone not yet wholly formed.

She’s grown familiar with the concept of John Connor, future savior of humanity. Tonight, for the first time, she starts to imagine John Connor as her son—a boy with an unasked-for destiny and a gun not meant for his small hands.

***

After that night, she thinks about John more. She doesn’t share anything of him with Pops—he has records on a military leader and tactical genius and can parrot secondhand tales of a near-mythical creature, but he knows nothing about the person underneath: the kid who will grow up in battle, the teenager who will watch the world end, the man who will breathe life back into it.

So Sarah wonders, and she makes up her own answers. He’ll like pancakes. He’ll favor Glocks. He’ll share her same taste in music. She’ll always shoot straighter, but he’ll be faster. And he’ll understand why she does what she does, what they were both raised to do, because there are roughly five billion people counting on them to do it. They move in a straight line, after all, even if time doesn’t. _You just go, and you don’t look back._

John—or at least the idea of him—begins to travel alongside her, wherever Pops determines will be the safest place, farthest away from where the T-1000 might look. A boy with a face she can’t quite make out watches carefully as she unloads, disassembles, cleans, reassembles, and reloads her personal armory, asking questions that she answers before he can give voice to them. He cocks his head in curiosity and consideration when Pops gives her the wheel of this month’s truck—another test of her quick reflexes and tactical processes, disguised as a taste of freedom—and she picks a direction that she hopes will keep them all safe.

She’s learned to live like this—like John will—because it’s who they have to be. Skynet has always lived alongside them, giving form to their lives in one way or another. Even Pops had once been a product of enemy factories, and now he’s shaping her so she can shape John, so he can shape the future. It’s a strange symbiosis, this relationship she and her son share with the machines.

Sometimes, Sarah thinks Skynet is raising them all.

***

As Sarah grows into her prescribed role, preparing for doomsday and its herald, it occurs to her to ask Pops for more information about her own future—not just John’s. He can be brutally honest when she asks the right questions, so Sarah prattles and prods until she has the information she thought she wanted.

It isn’t pretty: years in a mental asylum, dozens of civilian casualties, and death by leukemia well before her son meets his fate. And yet, the possibility of alternate timelines, of changing not just the world’s future but her own, lingers. It creeps through her mind like a flame curling the edge of a sheet of paper, until she can no longer put it aside.

The civilians are hard to care about, in a way. Sarah always does what she can not to leave bodies behind, and Pops doesn’t kill people—but the T-1000 does, and they’re always faceless and nameless and apparently insignificant to the larger unfolding of events. She lost the luxury of fearing her own death a long time ago—she’d like to put it off, of course, but it’s an inevitability of being human, and she’s learned the hard way that Connors don’t die of old age.

Pescadero is what haunts her. It keeps her lying awake, night after night, for weeks. Pops can’t say whether the Sarahs in those other timelines were actually insane, or just thought to be—a woman ready to tear the world apart to save her child is a dangerous thing, but this Sarah knows all too well how the knowledge of an unlived history can warp a healthy mind.

She stops asking Pops questions about John after that, but he remains on her mind, a funhouse-mirror version of an imaginary friend, and she can’t seem to let go of his presence, or at least her idea of it. That much makes sense—he’s been a constant for her as long as Pops has—but there’s still nothing normal about a teenager having silent yet substantive conversations with her unborn son. Sarah knows that, she does, but even if she can’t let go of her phantom John, even if she does belong in a world of shrinks and padded walls in this timeline, too, she still refrains from telling Pops about him. It’s not as if there’s anyone else who could find out.

Then Pops explains what’s meant to happen in 1984, and everything changes again.

***

She had finally asked why, if they know to expect this terrible future, if other timelines and other Sarahs are already possible, they can’t change things. In his usual declarative and clinical terms, Pops explains the handful of hours that it all relies on: whatever else happens, she cannot die by the T-800’s hand nor let Kyle Reese do so before she mates with him. The rest is secondary.

For the first time, Sarah learns about nexus points and the possibility of more time travelers and Terminators. She lies awake at night again, pushing away thoughts of a man who has to die for her in favor of questioning how to change the future without making it worse.

She wonders, _What would John do?_ There’s no way to know. She asks Pops that same question over and over and never gets a satisfactory answer; whatever else she knows about her son is her own fantasy. _But_ _we’re clever_ , she reminds herself, _and I teach him everything he knows_ , so she starts formulating a plan to choke off Skynet right when it matters most, turning the machines’ own technology and techniques against them. When Reese shows up, he can help if he wants, and John might be born into a future none of them dared to imagine.

It’s possible; she’s sure of it. If Pops and the T-1000 can come from a broken alternate timeline, if Reese can show up expecting a scared and weak waitress, if Skynet can be so certain of changing the future by changing the past—why can’t Sarah?

She can’t think of a good reason. But the obvious next question makes her breath catch in her throat. _If I can change the future, why didn’t John?_

Sending a soldier to 1984 ensures John’s own birth. It does nothing to save the lives of his grandparents—her parents—and it still condemns her to this life she never asked for, foisted upon her by _his_ life and _his_ choices. Where is the timeline where _she_ gets to choose?

As she figures out how to change the future in spite of John—as much as _for_ John—she starts to resent him. Her image of him shifts into a suddenly older ghost of the man who has defined both of their lives so decisively, who chose to reinforce their shared past, who has forced her to relive these horrors in every version of events.

He always circles back to save her—he needs her, at least for a dozen or so years—but he does it knowing she’ll be dead long before anyone else knows his name, before he’s even fully grown. Whatever she does for him happens early enough in his life that, by the time he becomes his future self, all he’ll remember is the vague certainty that his mother mattered. He won’t know _her_ anymore.

If he did, wouldn’t he have spared her this?

***

Ultimately, changing the events of 1984 is Sarah’s idea, Sarah’s mission, Sarah’s plan. Pops has grown more flexible over the years, but he’s still a machine and lacks imagination. So, once again, she asks the right questions to learn what she needs to know: potential uses for a decommissioned Terminator chassis and CPU, the opportunities presented by knowing for once where and when the T-1000 is likely to appear, ways to destroy a formless hunk of indestructible mimetic polyalloy for good, the chance of countless lifetimes to leap forward and fight Skynet on her own terms.

Pops is surprisingly easy to persuade once she points out that defeating or even slowing the rise of the machines will be a major contribution to her continued safety, in or out of his care. They’ll have an extra pair of hands and additional knowledge in John’s human soldier, though she puts aside thoughts of what else this new faceless man will bring. With the T-1000 eliminated, there won’t be anyone to stop them from saving the world _before_ it ends, instead of after.

Pops hesitates only when it comes to the necessity of John Connor’s birth. But Sarah has thought of that, too—it doesn’t matter _when_ John is born, so long as he’s there and ready when the machines rise. The jump ahead would delay his appearance, in absolute terms, but if the purpose of the jump is to move or even stop Judgment Day, then it won’t matter if he’s a dozen or so years younger than he’s meant to be, because humanity’s darkest days will be delayed, too.

And if Skynet never rises…it may not matter if he’s born at all.

Sarah can’t decide if that’s the future she wants, even hopes for. The idea of John, someone so essential to so much, has been a part of her for so long that it’s hard to imagine he could ever be erased. But she doesn’t tell Pops that part. If he asks—which he doesn’t—she would say it’s a way of freeing them both. From what, she’s less certain, but surely she can convince Reese of the same, if he’s meant for what Pops claims.

He agrees to engineer her plan, provided she hold up her end of things: creating the savior of humanity, regardless of when.

“Don’t you get it?” Sarah asks. “John isn’t humanity’s last hope anymore. I am.”

Pops doesn’t argue. Neither does Reese, later.

***

Sarah finally sees her son’s face, and it is everything and nothing like she imagined for so long. John’s tall and he’s _old_ , older than she’ll ever be, and his voice soothes something in her that she had never realized needed quelling. He talks about Elton John and smiles when she picks her own locks, and for a good few seconds her mind is frozen with the thought that something had hurt him—had hurt _her son_ —digging its claws deep into him and leaving grooved scars along his cheek.

The feeling doesn’t last. This may be her son’s face, but this is not her son.

It feels like a lifetime later that she’s hunkered down with Pops and Reese, assembling guns and sliding bullets into their chambers, when she looks across the room for a companion who isn’t there. The truth rushes through her, chilling her blood and twisting her insides. She hides it well, she knows—she’s been hiding him for so long by now—but she feels his sudden absence like a missing limb, and it lingers, heavy and acute, like her parents’ loss had.

But if there’s one thing Sarah Connor is good at, it’s moving forward, in a straight line, and not looking back.

After that, it’s easier to shoot the thing wearing her son’s face.

***

After Genisys falls, after no one who loves her dies in this present, after the sun rises on a world without a John Connor, Reese offers Sarah the first real human affection she’s experienced since she was nine and reminds her that this, _this_ is the timeline where she gets to choose.

She glances back at his family’s house as they drive away, at a life as alien now as it was familiar once, and back at the wonderfully real man beside her. He’s deep in thought—understandable, considering—but he squeezes her hand when she slips it into his.

There is no Skynet in this world now, so there’s no John, either. No past, no future. Just Sarah Connor and the open road. They even have cures for cancer now.

Still, Sarah thinks of the faceless boy who grew up alongside her, the child with the too-big gun and the too-big destiny. _Maybe I’d still like to meet him_ , she muses. Welcoming him into the world as an augur, rather than an omen, in this present they’re making, she can teach him a very different sort of survival: how to go forward in a straight line, how to live.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide! Thank you for your courage through the darkest year, and for the opportunity to explore this version of one of my all-time favorite characters.
> 
> Title comes from "[The Mother We Share](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mTRvJ9fugM)" by CHVRCHES.
> 
> My deepest and longest-running gratitude goes to [Red](http://archiveofourown.org/users/red_b_rackham) and [Lex](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ilostmyshoe) for everything, always. My betas are the best betas.


End file.
